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In trying to understand the crisis of the West, there is a tendency to stop with description - and indeed with a secular perspective that is necessary.
From a secular perspective there is no answer to 'why' - things have happened this way because this is the way things happen.
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So, the Christian and secular Right can agree that modern Western society increasingly operate on the basis of reversing, inverting whatever is spontaneous and Natural and has been known to humanity forever:
1. What was evil becomes virtue, and what was good behaviour is at best a hypocritical mask but in fact is an authoritarian, repressive, misery-inducing, sadistic, crushing, tyrannical... (etc)
2. What seems or seemed beautiful is Kitsch, lowbrow, sentimental, evasive fantasy - the aesthetically admirable is brutal, bare, inhuman, unappealing, violent, viscerally disgusting, subversive, despair inducing... (etc)
3. What was simple truth becomes contested, relative, uncertain, ambiguous, power-imposed; experience is challenged by statistics - statistics is refuted by single examples; reality becomes a thing made and remade, not discovered; truth is defined by virtue (ie. the inverted virtue of modernity); the people are invoked for validation by elites, who regard the people as knuckle-dragging savages and refuse their clear demands; sophisticated propaganda becomes the ultimate truth... etc
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Everyone on the Right pretty much agrees on the above and a lot more - but why did this happen?
What lies behind this change, what drives it?
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The secular Right generally identify a particular (elite) human group which has driven the above changes, and who benefit materially from such changes; they are the evil ones who have originated wrong ideas, imposed them and tricked the populace and so on.
True enough, but why? And who? And do they know they are doing it? And why don't they stop?
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The problem is that secular perspectives are unclear about the nature of evil. They see that people who pursue evil are not usually themselves evil - and are confused about where the evil may be.
The traditional Christian Right have no problem with all this because they perceive that evil is not located in individual people, nor in the behaviour of particular groups of people; but evil is a transcendental force in the world.
For Christians, purposive evil in the world is located not in people but in the fallen angelic powers opposed to God - in immaterial persons known as Satan, the devil, demons and so on. That is the location of evil, that is its purpose and driving force.
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The evil is not primarily in people, nor in groups; these are not in themselves evil, but the evil forces of the world are those who serve evil.
Good and evil are themselves clear cut and unambiguous (although our knowledge of them is incomplete and distorted) - and the decision which side to serve is potentially clear cut and unambiguous (although evil, of course, muddies the waters by its subversion and inversions).
Actually serving Good or evil is not clear cut and ambiguous, but the will to serve one or the other is cc&un-amb.
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So...
The continual, 24/7 saturation propaganda for evil; the moral and aesthetic inversions, the pervasive relativism and dishonesty which are inflicted upon Western humanity by the mass media, government officials, education, the legal system etc. - these do not have their own primary agenda, but are activities in service of, driven by, purposive evil - which is why the participants are so often nice people.
Nice people often make excellent servants of evil.
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A brief answer to why things are the way they are is therefore that many individual humans have willed, have chosen, to serve evil - and as the consequences have accumulated it has become harder to choose Good.
To choose evil is rewarded in the short term by comfort, power, status, diversions; to choose Good is to be punished; Good choosing people diminish in status, lose money, are shunned and vilified, made to suffer in numerous ways, find their choices narrowed.
So evil choices generate more evil, and make easier further evil choices.
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In the spiritual warfare between Good and evil, on this world, in this life, in Time; evil will win - eventually, sooner or later (maybe sooner).
And that is the process we are observing.
It is the latest manifestation of purposive evil at work in the world, and an accumulation of the weight of sin.
That is why we suffer coordinated and motivated anti-Good mass propaganda - despite that there is no obvious focus for it.
That is the bottom line explanation.
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